"The View from My Window"

By now you should have digested your Thanksgiving dinner, paid off the football pool, and are recovering from injuries incurred when your played touch football with your grandchildren. It is time to sit back, forget politics for the moment and contemplate the world outside your window. I hope this brief essay sets the mood.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“The View from My Window”

November 29, 2025

 

“She opened her curtains, and looked out toward the bit of road that lay in view, with

fields beyond the entrance-gates...Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she

felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance.”

                                                                                                                                George Eliot (1819-1880)

                                                                                                                                Middlemarch, 1871

 

Having lived in two apartments and six houses over sixty-one years of marriage, my wife and I have looked out at the carcass of a butchered deer from our first apartment in Durham, New Hampshire, to watching our Chocolate Lab “Bundle” chase her tail across the lawn in Greenwich, to observing flights of marsh birds from our home in Old Lyme. Now, for the past (almost) ten years, our sight is of the comings and goings at Essex Meadows, a view of a parking lot and distant hills, framed by a nearby oak tree. 

 

It is life we witness, (or in the case of the deer, what was once life became sustenance for the hunter and his family). What better vista than a window can there be to see life in all its variety. Who can forget Jimmy Stewart in the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Rear Window” where his curiosity solved a crime but almost became his demise. Nevertheless, I empathize with the Turkish playwright Mehmet Murat ildan, or at least with the quote attributed to him: “Your desire to be near to a window is your desire to be close to life.” 

 

Of all the places we have lived, the scene from our windows in Old Lyme was the most spectacular, but also the most serene. We looked across the Connecticut River to Old Saybrook, a mile or so distant. On the far side of the river we could see, but not hear, power boats. Nearby were tidal marshes that surrounded our dock, marshes that teem with life, nature’s urban centers. Osprey swept to and fro, as they fed on menhaden that thrive in the marsh rivers that separated us from Great Island. And nothing could compete with the beauty of a crimson sun sinking below the horizon across the River – its rays reaching out above the houses and trees in Old Saybrook – an omen of “sailors delight” for the next day.

 

Today, our view is quite different. But all windows unlock a lookout on a world of wonder, as Hannah Sheldon-Dean inferred in her 2023 children’s book, Windows to the Wonders of the World. It is life we witness, from the budding of plants in the spring, to birds welcoming a summer morning with song, to squirrels putting away food for the winter to come. Before we arise each morning crews are on the job, making our lives more pleasant. Early on a few dogs are walked by residents, or is it the other way around? These are people we know, people we care about and who care about us. “Set wide the window,” wrote Edith Wharton in Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, “let me drink the day.” And so we do.